The news that Google is spending US$7 million on newspaper ads all round the world makes me, as a newspaper journalist, feel as if it were Christmas: but a snowy, cold Christmas, and I am a peasant whom King Wenceslas has seen gathering scraps of wood with which to boil a nourishing pot of water.
Now the king — or Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman — rides out from his castle with his page and graciously orders him to give me a meal taken from the luxurious dinner in the great hall. Well, it's delicious, all right. Don't think I am complaining. But once the king has gone and I am once more huddled in the draughty hut, he will still be the king, and I the peasant sharecropper.
The great difference between a king and a peasant is not that one has enough to eat and the other does not. That's important, but it could change, were it not for the really important difference, which is that the king can at any time take away what the peasant has to eat, whereas the peasant has no power against the king. He doesn't even really own the products of his own labors, and he certainly doesn't own the king's snowy waste that he picks over for a few sticks of firewood.
That is where the newspaper business fears it will find itself as it moves online. In the new world, we will all be sharecroppers for Google. In the old days, people paid for their newspapers. In the future, so far as anyone can see, they will not pay for anything that they do not get direct from advertisers and the function of news is merely to attract people to advertisements. That has always been truer than journalists would like to believe. But in the new wintry world of the Internet, this cold truth forms, like the snow, the background to everything we see.
Of course there are plenty of journalists who write for the attention. But I suspect that most of them have thought the attention was directed at them, and for their benefit; not at the ads behind them. Only the people who made money from newspapers understood how they made money.
Lord Beaverbrook even coined a law expressing his secret: “Any journalist may be replaced by any other journalist.”
But the people who make money from news now don't own the papers. They own Google and their motto might be one step beyond Lord Beaverbrook's: “Any newspaper may be replaced by any other newspaper.”
This doesn’t make Google malevolent, any more than the sainted King Wenceslas was malevolent. He owned his castle, and his peasants, and if he didn't, someone else would. Sure enough, the real Wenceslas was slaughtered by his brother, and though Google looks much more secure than that it would be silly to bet on its still being the company that owns the marketplace in 50 years' time. By then people may not even know that they are entering a marketplace when they type, or talk on to a screen or perhaps a holographically configured section of the local air. They will just suppose that the air is full of magic. But it's a sure bet that someone will be making money off the magic, and it won’t be us.
And now Google is moving into the book trade. These advertisements are part of its plan to digitize the contents of almost all the important libraries in the world and make their contents available for free. The copyright holders, at whom the legal-notice ads are directed, will be paid out of a licensing arrangement, as if they were musicians being broadcast over the radio. Speaking as someone who last year made £37.50 (US$52.33) from public lending rights, I can see a snag in this plan, but that is hardly Google's fault.
If new book publishing ever moves into purely electronic forms, writers will be even worse off, because printing a book turned out to be a really resilient, simple, and widely accepted form of copy protection. If books are ever as easily copied as digital music, it will be dreadful news for anyone who writes them.
A brief and frightening glimpse of the future there was provided by the bankruptcy of one of Amazon’s suppliers in the UK last month, who left a warehouse of books for anyone to collect for free. Sure enough, hundreds of people turned up and filled their cars. Does anyone really think these collectors will spend more money on other books as a result? Yet that is the argument that boosters of music piracy constantly make.
No, for a market to exist there must be laws and the means to enforce them. Peasants feared bad kings, but they feared anarchy more, and with good reason. Google, like Wenceslas, seems set to be a good, wise king, strong and not too rapacious.
I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs